I currently have Series 3 with dual drives, 750GB internal and 1TB eSata.
I want to consolidate both into a single internal drive of maximum capacity.
I have read that 2.2TB is the largest filesystem possible on Series 3. It seems most people put in a 2TB drive, but you miss out on that last 0.2 TB of potential storage. Can I install a 2.5TB drive (WD25EURS) and get a full 2.2TB available? I'm fine with not accessing the remaining 0.3TB.

Furthermore, is WinMFS the best way to go? It seems to not have been updated in 4 years and the forum postings are also very old. Are there other tools or up to date resources?

I would like to copy everything, including recordings. Worst case I could truncate partitions and lose recordings, but I'd rather keep them if possible. I don't care how long it takes to copy. I don't want to lose season passes or cable-card configuration.

I currently have Series 3 with dual drives, 750GB internal and 1TB eSata.
I want to consolidate both into a single internal drive of maximum capacity.
I have read that 2.2TB is the largest filesystem possible on Series 3. It seems most people put in a 2TB drive, but you miss out on that last 0.2 TB of potential storage. Can I install a 2.5TB drive (WD25EURS) and get a full 2.2TB available? I'm fine with not accessing the remaining 0.3TB.

Furthermore, is WinMFS the best way to go? It seems to not have been updated in 4 years and the forum postings are also very old. Are there other tools or up to date resources?

I would like to copy everything, including recordings. Worst case I could truncate partitions and lose recordings, but I'd rather keep them if possible. I don't care how long it takes to copy. I don't want to lose season passes or cable-card configuration.

Any advice would be very welcome.
Thanks!

No on all counts, at this point no TiVo will boot up with a drive bigger than 2Tb (nobody makes a 2.2Tb drive that I know of) I tried everything with a 2.5Tb drive myself, its a no go even if you don't expand the drive.

No on all counts, at this point no TiVo will boot up with a drive bigger than 2Tb (nobody makes a 2.2Tb drive that I know of) I tried everything with a 2.5Tb drive myself, its a no go even if you don't expand the drive.

Thanks, that will save me some frustration then. Ok, I'm going to use a 2TB drive, the WD20EURS. Is that one ok? Is WinMFS still my best bet for copying everything from2 drives onto 1 drive?

Thanks, that will save me some frustration then. Ok, I'm going to use a 2TB drive, the WD20EURS. Is that one ok? Is WinMFS still my best bet for copying everything from2 drives onto 1 drive?

Yes on both. I upgraded my S3 OLED with a WD20EURS using WinMFS. The only "glitch" I had is when it asks if you want to use the additional space to expand the drive after you just copied the drive. To avoid the "glitch" just say no there. Then click on MFSAdd and tell it to expand the drive. When it warns you about the 1TB limit, tell it you do not want to limit it to 1TB. Then supersize afterwards. Just make sure your TiVo is on version 11.0k. The "glitch" I had was if I said yes to expand right after the copy process, it acted like it was going to expand the drive but never did. I had to cancel and use MFSAdd to expand. Just to make sure I did it right and the glitch did not do anything, I redid the copy, said no to the expand, then did MFSadd to expand. No problems since.

__________________
"Delay is preferable to error" - Thomas Jefferson
"If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of Giants" - Sir Isaac Newton

My Tivo HD is now happy with 318 HD hours on the new WD20EURS (4/2013 manufacture date)

Quote:

Originally Posted by jmbach

The only "glitch" I had is when it asks if you want to use the additional space to expand the drive after you just copied the drive. To avoid the "glitch" just say no there. Then click on MFSAdd and tell it to expand the drive. When it warns you about the 1TB limit, tell it you do not want to limit it to 1TB. Then supersize afterwards. Just make sure your TiVo is on version 11.0k. The "glitch" I had was if I said yes to expand right after the copy process, it acted like it was going to expand the drive but never did. I had to cancel and use MFSAdd to expand. Just to make sure I did it right and the glitch did not do anything, I redid the copy, said no to the expand, then did MFSadd to expand. No problems since.

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The only known way to copy from an internal and an external is to copy them off to computer and then from computer back to the new internal.

It's because of the way that the TiVo handles recordings when there's an external drive in the equation.

There are ways to accomplish a direct copy/consolidation. I have done it with a great deal of help from jmbach on the S3 OLED. Took an original internal 250 GB and an external 1TB, and made a single bootable 2TB internal drive with everything including recordings intact.

It is true, however, that none of the currently widely available tools that do this sort of thing will work, mostly because they do not anticipate the huge number of sectors on a 2TB drive, and fail when trying to deal with them.

Can you please post some details of how you accomplished it? Doesn't have to be a newbie guide, but just a few pointers in the right direction. Did it require fixed/recompiled tools that haven't been posted? Thanks!

Can you please post some details of how you accomplished it? Doesn't have to be a newbie guide, but just a few pointers in the right direction. Did it require fixed/recompiled tools that haven't been posted? Thanks!

Yes, there was a modified version of mfslive required. The method we more or less used was actually posted several years ago on Spike's forum, but did not work with large drives because mfslive 1.4 couldn't handle the sector count:

Also, while it worked on one of my S3 OLEDs, it did not work on the other because the first had the original drive while other did not, and the number of partitions could no longer be expanded as a result of having done it once before. I'd love to get the second one done, but there seems to be no way at the moment.

Yes, there was a modified version of mfslive required. The method we more or less used was actually posted several years ago on Spike's forum, but did not work with large drives because mfslive 1.4 couldn't handle the sector count:

Also, while it worked on one of my S3 OLEDs, it did not work on the other because the first had the original drive while other did not, and the number of partitions could no longer be expanded as a result of having done it once before. I'd love to get the second one done, but there seems to be no way at the moment.

So in combining the internal and external into one big internal you still had to obey the no more than 16 partitions per drive rule?

Thanks for the pointer. Unfortunately, the forum you linked to is restricted to registered users, and it isn't possible to register on that site anymore. Is the method described somewhere else?

jmbach had alluded to a possible method where the partitions from the external drive get copied to the internal, and then the superblock gets updated to point to the new partitions instead of the old ones. Is that what worked for you? I have a S3 OLED with the original HD (with 13 partitions on it) and an external 1TB (with 2 partitions on it), and I'd love to get them onto one drive. In theory, can't the two external partitions be brought onto the internal drive, (raising the total count to 15), and then the internal drive expanded to the full 2TB via WinMFS creating a 16th coalesced partition? (Of course, when I say "internal drive", I mean a replacement 2 TB internal drive, not the original 250GB internal drive.)

Last edited by cniessen : 12-01-2013 at 10:50 PM.
Reason: Clarified what I meant by "internal drive"

We tried all sorts of things (and when I say "we", jmbach did all the heavy lifting, I pretty much just followed instructions), moving around partitions, coalescing them, and so forth, and were unsuccessful. This method, along with a recompiled mfslive to accommodate bigger drives, was what finally worked. At the very end, it took almost 15 minutes for the last "divorce", and the TiVo had to reboot a couple of times to get everything arranged the way it liked it, but in the end, everything was preserved.

Here is the original post from MFSLive.org:

Guide to consolidating a Series 3 without losing recordings

Postby Thom » Sat Jul 12, 2008 5:06 pm
I have now consolidated 3 different Series 3 machines from a 250GB+750GB configuration to a single 1TB configuration without losing any recordings.

To do this, you will need the MFSLive v1.4 CD.

In my examples below from my Series 3 backups and restores, my system uses the following drive assignments:

Personally, I like to run a couple of quick tests before I begin the actual copy process, which took about 8 hours on my machine.

My first quick test to make sure I can read the source hard disks:

backup -o /dev/null /dev/sdb /dev/sdc

If successful, my second quick test to make sure I can write the destination hard disk:

backup -qo - /dev/sdb /dev/sdc | restore -zi - /dev/sda

If successful, my actual full copy command (which took about 8 hours):

backup -qTao - /dev/sdb /dev/sdc | restore -zi - /dev/sda

Once the copy is complete, the new drive is still not ready for use. If you were to install it now, you would get a Wrong External Storage Attached message on your Series 3.

Use pdisk on the hard disk to modify the partitions:

pdisk /dev/sda

Press lowercase p to display the partitions on the hard disk. You should see 16 partitions, with Apple_Free being the 16th partition.

Write down the length of the Apple_Free partition (partition 16). This will be referred to as length16.

Now delete partitions 15, 14, and 13:

d 15 d 14 d 13

You can delete them all on one line like above, or you can delete them individually. Start with 15 and work your way to 13.

Now display your partitions with lowercase p again. The Apple_Free partition is now partition 13.

Write down the new length of the Apple_Free partition (partition 13). This will be referred to as length13.

Subtract length16 from length13, and write it down. This will be referred to as length14.

Press uppercase C to create a new partition. Do not use lowercase c as it will not allow you to specify the partition type.

13p will be the starting block. (13p just means use the start block currently assigned to partition 13.)

The length will be the length14 number you calculated.

"Second MFS media region" will be the name of the partition, INCLUDING the quotation marks. If you don't include the quotation marks, only the word Second will be used, and the rest will be discarded.

MFS in uppercase letters will be the type of partition.

Now press p to display your new partition info.

Compare the length of the current Apple_Free partition (should be partition 14) to the length16 number. They should be identical. (Basically, you are checking to make sure that you made the new partition 13 exactly the same length as the old partitions 13, 14 and 15 combined.)

If they are not identical, you made a mistake somewhere. Exit pdisk with a q command, then start pdisk again and try again.

If they are identical, then press lowercase w to write the new partition layout to the hard disk. You will have to answer y to the warning message.

Press q to exit pdisk.

You are done with the hard disk. Install it in your Series 3.

When your Series 3 boots for the first time on the newly consolidated and repartitioned hard disk, you will see a Missing External Storage message. This is expected. Simply follow the on-screen prompts to press the clear button, then to press the thumbs up button three times and to press the enter button.

It will take about 5 minutes to remove all reference to the external drive and reboot.

You will not lose any recordings. They are are still on the newly expanded partition 13 of the A drive.

[EDIT] Automatic expansion by connecting an external drive to the Series 3 will not work after consolidating. It will detect the drive and prompt you as to whether you want to configure the external drive for use by the Series 3, but after it goes through all the preparation steps the external drive will not marry to the internal drive.

[EDIT] You can expand from a single drive Series 3 to a dual drive Series 3 by first running fixdivorce on the single drive, then using mfsadd to add the second drive.

[EDIT] Removed references to "s3backup" and replaced them with "backup" since MFSLive v1.4 works with dual-drive Series 3 machines (v1.3 did not). Added "z" flag to restore command since (I'm told) there is a bug in restore regarding partition boundaries when "z" is not used, but no bug when "z" is used.

I'm working on a program that will take any combination of drives and copy everything to a single drive with two standard MFS partition pairs (as long as the recordings will fit). It's probably a few months from beta testing.

There's also hope for larger drives. I don't have a Series 3 to play with but I figured out how to trick my Premiere into running on a 3TB drive. Once I finish the program it should be able to use the extra space.

Thanks for the post; that's hugely helpful. Is the intent of deleting partitions 13,14,15 and creating a new partition 13 that encompasses all of the data to avoid having to mess with the MFS superblock? Since partition 13 is already in the devlist, then that partition (and all of the data in it) will be available during the divorce, so the tivo will magically find it.

Once the divorce is complete, did you try using mfsadd to create an additional pair of partitions to make the extra space on the internal disk available?

And just out of curiosity, did you try modifying the devlist in the MFS superblock directly? I'm sure that would be harder, but I'm equally interested in what didn't work, so that I don't go down those rabbit holes myself.

Thanks for the post; that's hugely helpful. Is the intent of deleting partitions 13,14,15 and creating a new partition 13 that encompasses all of the data to avoid having to mess with the MFS superblock?

Yes, I think so. We tried endless numbers of things with modifying the superblock, and none of them worked, although a few came close. There are hidden checksums, and additionally at least two places where the tivo notes that the drive is married, and gets confused about that. One of the lessons learned was that a divorce inside the tivo takes AT LEAST five minutes. If the divorce screen disappears and the machine reboots after a minute or two, it's just going to ask to divorce again, over and over.

Quote:

Once the divorce is complete, did you try using mfsadd to create an additional pair of partitions to make the extra space on the internal disk available?

Yes, but...

Once the new drive is booting properly, you must remove it and delete newly created (by TiVo) partitions 14-16, after which the # of partitions on template pages 1-13 must be changed to 13. Pdisk does not work for this. We used Ibored.

Once that's done it has to go back in the TiVo to be divorced again. It should take 5-10 minutes.

At that point, drive can be pulled, and mfsadd can be used to expand the drive.

Then back in the TiVo again to clean things up using its self-healing properties. After a successful boot, remove from TiVo, and Winmfs can be used to supersize it, and done.

A supersized 2TB drive should have about 318 hours HD recording capacity.

DO NOT use Winmfs for anything except to supersize. Using it for anything else will make the disk unbootable.

I have 318 hours of capacity on the internal 2TB drive, and it's been up and running since July, so the mod seems stable.

Quote:

And just out of curiosity, did you try modifying the devlist in the MFS superblock directly? I'm sure that would be harder, but I'm equally interested in what didn't work, so that I don't go down those rabbit holes myself.

Yes, that was one of the first things we tried. A frigging nightmare. Never worked - drive either asked to be divorced endlessly, or else the TiVo would say that the wrong external drive was attached.

And please keep in mind that the "release" version of MFSlive WILL NOT WORK to do this with 2 TB drives.

I am posting this in the hopes of inspiring others. And on a selfish note, because it would be great if someone came up with a way to do this with the internal drive having been increased in size once, so I could do my other S3.

Hmm. Interesting. What were the new partitions that Tivo created after the first divorce? Were they an MFS application/data pair? What was in them? How big were they? Was partition 13 still the size of the original partition 13 plus the data from the external HD (i.e. >1TB), or had the auto recovery process done something to split that back into three partitions? Since after the first divorce, the TiVo thought it should have these extra partitions. I wonder if they could just be resized to use up the rest of the disk, and the TiVo would just go ahead and start using them, instead of deleting them then creating new ones with mfsadd/winmfs.

Hmm. Interesting. What were the new partitions that Tivo created after the first divorce? Were they an MFS application/data pair? What was in them? How big were they? Was partition 13 still the size of the original partition 13 plus the data from the external HD (i.e. >1TB), or had the auto recovery process done something to split that back into three partitions? Since after the first divorce, the TiVo thought it should have these extra partitions. I wonder if they could just be resized to use up the rest of the disk, and the TiVo would just go ahead and start using them, instead of deleting them then creating new ones with mfsadd/winmfs.

Partition 13 was huge, contained all the shows from the external drive plus whatever was there before. The new partitions were tiny and as far as I could tell, empty. But they added to the partition count and had to be deleted before the disk could be expanded.

It was a simple matter to delete them, and manually reset the total partition count to 13, after which mfsadd created the new partition to expand the disk to its full capacity.

If you don't want to do the extra steps, you will have the same capacity for shows as before on a single drive, but I didn't want to waste all that space, and once we figured it out, the steps were simple.

When you deleted the extra partitions, did the partition map only show the 13 partitions (plus maybe an 14th Apple_Free partition) or did it continue to show additional entries? Looking at the source code for pdisk, it looks like it should have cleaned up the extra partitions (it combines two adjacent Apple_Free partitions into one, and deletes the extra PM entry) and adjusted the partition map entry count properly throughout the PM. I'm only wondering because it would be trivial to write a little program to clean up the partition map, but it seems like pdisk should have done it, assuming its based on Apple source from post May 2000.

I wonder if the PM entry count could have been adjusted before the initial divorce, and only have to do it once? You didn't by any chance try that, did you?

When you deleted the extra partitions, did the partition map only show the 13 partitions (plus maybe an 14th Apple_Free partition) or did it continue to show additional entries? Looking at the source code for pdisk, it looks like it should have cleaned up the extra partitions (it combines two adjacent Apple_Free partitions into one, and deletes the extra PM entry) and adjusted the partition map entry count properly throughout the PM. I'm only wondering because it would be trivial to write a little program to clean up the partition map, but it seems like pdisk should have done it, assuming its based on Apple source from post May 2000.

I wonder if the PM entry count could have been adjusted before the initial divorce, and only have to do it once? You didn't by any chance try that, did you?

Yes, it worked as you surmised (13+Apple_free), pdisk did its job properly, until the drive was put back into the TiVo and divorced. That step recreated partitions 14-16. If I remember correctly (this was about five months ago), trying to delete them again with pdisk did not seem to adjust the partition count correctly (or at all). Hence we used iBored to delete them and manually enter the partition count at 13.

We did not try setting the PM entry count before the divorce. I don't know if that would have worked.

Ggieseke has the more eloquent way of accomplishing this task. My modification of MFSLive tools was more of a brute force mod. I found the issue and modified everything potentially related to it whether it needed it or not.

__________________
"Delay is preferable to error" - Thomas Jefferson
"If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of Giants" - Sir Isaac Newton

Ggieseke has the more eloquent way of accomplishing this task. My modification of MFSLive tools was more of a brute force mod. I found the issue and modified everything potentially related to it whether it needed it or not.

I HOPE to have an easier way soon. Right now it's mostly just code running around in my head that hasn't leaked out through the keyboard yet.

Ggieseke has the more eloquent way of accomplishing this task. My modification of MFSLive tools was more of a brute force mod. I found the issue and modified everything potentially related to it whether it needed it or not.

Can I get a copy of the source as it stands? I would be interested in knowing what the itch was that you were scratching. (Was it just converting everything that dealt with sectors from int32 to uint32? Or to uint64?) The only source code I have access to is the circa-2005 MFStools on sourceforge, which is pretty out of date at this point, and would probably be a painful starting point. I'd like to get the source so that I can better see whats going on, and modify the behavior if necessary.

Ideally, if I could get the original source and your modified tree, I can just diff it and see what you've done. Thanks!